Blog Posts

Above the Expo in a hallway, I found an art installation exhibit that, in a quiet and unassuming way, pulled together many of the overarching themes of Congress this year. Held May 27–June 2 in Toronto, Congress 2017 set out to push attendees to think about Canada’s past, while imagining what the next 150 years […]

“Keep hold of a few plain truths, and make everything square with them. When I was young … there never was any question about right and wrong … Every respectable Church person had the same opinions. But now, if you speak out of the Prayer-book itself, you are liable to be contradicted.” Those are the […]

By Janet Miron and Joan Sangster, faculty members at Trent University |
March 14th, 2017

Are books a condition of our labour? Do we need libraries with stacks and physical collections? Recent discussions within libraries across the country have highlighted faculty anxiety and displeasure with the fate of university libraries, as cuts are made to purchasing and operating budgets, collections culled, and the very nature of acquisitions transformed by changes […]

After a marathon bargaining session that stretched into the pre-dawn hours of November 26, 2015 the Nipissing University Faculty Association (NUFA) reached a tentative deal with its employer that ended a twenty-five-day strike, the first ever for faculty at this small, northern Ontario University. The issue that galvanized the approximately 170 tenure-stream faculty members to […]

Academic Matters is now entering its 11th year of publication and has changed significantly over this period. The views of our readers are important in guiding the future development of the magazine and website. With that in mind, we created a survey to get a better idea of how our readers feel about the editorial […]

Getting the right skills for the job market is a hot topic these days. What skills are employers looking for? Are students prepared for the workforce? These questions are being discussed on university campuses, debated in national newspapers, and considered by policy-makers across jurisdictions. In a challenging labour market, it’s really no surprise that this […]

You’ve likely heard or seen a story somewhere in the media that employers face a skills shortage, or “skills gap”. The message coming from employers is that workers or education system—or both!—just don’t cut it. Unfortunately, the story that there are too few qualified workers for the jobs available is largely a myth. Nobel Prize-winning […]

Two very interesting sessions today, but for two very different reasons. The first featured research by Mary Catharine Lennon on learning outcomes. This is a hot topic in Canadian policy circles, part of a push for universities to demonstrate to government and the public the value created by their teaching activities. Lennon suggests that we’re […]

It was another interesting day here at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Calgary. Two sessions stood out as particularly relevant, one on university governance and another on what universities must do to enact the principles and recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The governance session, hosted by […]

The past few years have seen university governance jump from relative obscurity and into the headlines. How universities are run is suddenly big news. The issue of Academic Matters you have in your hands right now contains first-hand accounts of some of the campus stories that have found their way into the national media. From […]

The team at Academic Matters is always thrilled to attend the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, this year in Calgary, Alberta. We tend to gravitate towards the Canadian Society for Studies in Higher Education (CSSHE), as their program tends to align with the interests of our readers. But with over 70 scholarly associations […]

THE FIRST European universities, for the most part established through papal bulls, coexisted uneasily with secular authorities. They were located within kingdoms and nascent nation states, but they were not of those states. In China, ancient universities were entrusted with training the bureaucrats that made imperial rule possible. They were very much organisms of empire. As […]

Austerity and precarity figured largely on the agenda at the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies conference this week at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Ottawa. Conversations about how to define precarious work and its impacts on workers’ lives ran through the sessions. Meanwhile, reflections on how to organize workers in a climate […]

A new book on the impact of corporatization on Canada’s universities was launched on June 4 in Ottawa by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. In A Penny For Your Thoughts, authors Janice Newson and Claire Polster document how the transformation of postsecondary education over the last 35 years has been driven by corporatization. The […]

The annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences brought academics from across the country together in Ottawa this past week. As if on cue, the Globe and Mail published a column by Margaret Wente that took potshots at humanities and social science scholarship. While there are few in attendance at Congress who take this […]